(i) Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of plant breeding. More particularly, the invention encompasses a variety of cotton designated as FM 960B2R, its essentially derived varieties and the hybrid varieties obtained by crossing FM 960B2R as a parent line with plants of other varieties or parent lines.
(ii) Description of the Related Art
Cotton is an important, fiber producing crop. In particular, due to the importance of cotton to the textile industry, cotton breeders are increasingly seeking to obtain healthy, good yielding crops of an excellent quality. Cotton is commonly reproduced by self-pollination and fertilization. This type of sexual reproduction facilitates the preservation of plant and variety characteristics during breeding and seed production. The preservation of these characteristics are often important to plant breeders for producing cotton plants having desired traits. Other methods of producing cotton plants having desired traits are also used and include methods such as genetic transformation via Agrobacterium infection or direct transfer by microparticle bombardment.
Due to the environment, the complexity of the structure of genes and location of a gene in the genome, among other factors, it is difficult to predict the phenotypic expression of a particular genotype. In addition, a plant breeder may only apply his skills on the phenotype and not, or in a very limited way, on the level of the genotype. Because of this phenomenon, a plant breeder cannot breed the same variety twice using the same parents and the same methodology, thus a newly bred variety is considered to be an unexpected result of the breeding process. In particular, each variety will typically contain a unique combination of known or novel characteristics.
However, by carefully choosing the breeding parents, the breeding and selection methods, the testing layout and testing locations, the breeder may breed a particular variety type. In addition, the new variety may be tested in special comparative trials with other existing varieties in order to determine whether the new variety meets the required expectations.